Maxwell's Grave (13 page)

‘Is there any news?’ the woman asked.

Maxwell tried to gauge her age. Early thirties, probably, but it was difficult to tell. A stranger to underwear, Mrs Choker’s breasts lay heavily around her waist, her nipples resting on the formica table top. She’d once been quite attractive, Maxwell realized, but the years and the kids and the Barlichway had all taken their toll.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘When did you see her last, Mrs Choker?’

‘It’s not Mrs Choker,’ the woman said. ‘That’s just the name I gave Annette when she started school. Choker was her dad’s name. I wonder where he is now?’

‘Jenny’s his girl, too?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Yeah.’ The woman who was not Mrs Choker lit up a
second
fag, having mashed the first into an ashtray on the table in front of her. ‘Do you?’

‘No, thanks,’ he smiled. ‘So what do I call you?’

‘Selina,’ she said.

‘Selina,’ he nodded. ‘When did you see Annette last?’

‘Let’s see.’ She screwed up her eyes as the smoke filled her face. ‘Week last Thursday. I told the coppers. We’d had a row.’

‘Really? What about?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! ‘Scuse me, Mr Maxwell,’ and Selina dashed to the door. ‘Shut that fuckin’ dog up, Jennifer. I’ve got company! Sorry about that,’ and the woman resumed her position opposite the teacher from up at the school. ‘She kept going out,’ Selina said, rummaging in the bits and pieces of the table for a coffee mug. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Mr Maxwell, she was a right bloody handful. Oh, I loved her, of course I did. But talk about wilful! Still,’ she snorted, ‘I was just the same at her age, I suppose, looking back. Well, it’s the hormones, ain’t it? That and looking for a better life. Not exactly a bundle of laffs round here. D’you wanna coffee?’

‘No thanks. Had she gone off before, Selina?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Once or twice. Oh, not for long, though.’ Selina laughed. ‘The first time, she was five. She’d heard about Disneyland, seen it on the telly. We’d had an up and downer – she was a little cow, even then. And she packed her bag
with a towel and a toy and off she went. I caught up with her at the chip shop. Mr Patel had spotted her and sent his eldest to tell me. I didn’t even know she’d gone.’

‘This time,’ Maxwell brought her back to the here and now, ‘she took a bit more than a towel and a toy?’

‘Yeah,’ Selina grunted, flicking ash off her cigarette. ‘Half her fucking clothes and 40 quid of mine. Why do they have to grow up, eh?’

Some of them don’t, Maxwell thought, but whatever else this woman was, Selina was the girl’s mother. She didn’t need that kind of comment; not now. ‘Is there anywhere she might have gone? Her father…’

Selina shook her head. ‘Annette barely knew him. He was gone by the time she started school. I can’t find him and nor can the Child Support people, so I don’t see how she could. Anyway, she wouldn’t want to. All this bollocks about kids wanting to find their natural fathers – what’s that all about? Especially when their natural fathers bugger off in the first place. You got kids, Mr Maxwell?’

Not for the first time, Peter Maxwell saw the little face he loved, the little face he saw again sometimes in his
deepest
dreams, his little girl. ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Or twelve hundred of them, depending on how you look at it.’

‘What? Oh, yeah. Right.’

‘What about other relatives?’ he persisted. ‘Aunties? Uncles?’

‘I haven’t spoken to my sister since 1987. She don’t even know I got Annette. My mum’s dead and I never knew who my dad was – that’s history repeating itself, that is. Annette’s got a sister in Halifax. Well, half-sister, actually. I don’t talk to her no more.’

Maxwell smiled. ‘What about friends, then? Did she have a best friend?’

‘Michaela,’ Selina nodded. ‘Michaela Reynolds. Lives out along the railway somewhere. But she ain’t there. And she ain’t in Halifax neither. The coppers have checked. Look, Mr Maxwell, it’s nice of you to go to all this trouble, but if you ain’t Annette’s teacher…’

‘Tell me, Selina, when you and Annette weren’t off hooks, did she ever mention any of her teachers, Mr Fry?’

‘Fry?’ the woman frowned. ‘No. I don’t think so. Why?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ Maxwell sighed. ‘Just a long shot.’

Norman had been true to his word and White Surrey still gleamed in his grubby hands as Peter Maxwell repossessed it. He checked his watch. ‘Bedtime, boys,’ he called and
listened
to their jeers die away as he purred out of Pear Court and navigated his way, via the stars, to the old railway line. ‘And don’t forget that homework!’

Henry Hudson, the railway king, had once walked this way, with his maps and his theodolites and minions
flapping
in his wake. That was in 1842 before he’d got greedy and started selling spurious lines. The
Leighford-Littlehampton
line was about the last honest buck Henry Hudson had ever made.

The row of Victorian cottages was still there, built above the line the navvies had laid. And for once, they hadn’t just erected their shanty towns with scraps of wood and iron and dossed down with their dogs and their wives and their barrels of cider. They’d put down roots and they’d stayed. Even so, the cottages were not unlike a shanty town again. Satellite dishes protruded from every angle, half-stripped cars and bikes lay propped on bricks on what were once neat, carefully tended front gardens. The heady aroma of the Taj Mahal Balti House wafted over Hudson’s old track, now a skateboard park where noisy infants defied gravity
by hurtling upside down through space.

Peter Maxwell rapped on the door of the end house. More dogs. More crying children. It was nearly dark by now and the rattle and roar of the skateboards was eerier in the stark floodlights that suddenly switched on. It was a surreal scene that George Orwell might have capitalized on had he lived.
2004
he’d have called the novel. And the skateboard park of Railway Cottages would have been his Room 101.

A vest came to the door – the south coast’s answer to Rab C Nesbitt. ‘Yeah?’

‘Mr Reynolds?’

Mr Reynolds could have been anything from twenty five to fifty. His shoulders sported black curling hair and dragon tattoos coiled menacingly over his biceps to snap and roar at his wrists.

He took in the stranger at his door. Stupid hat. Poncy bow tie. Fuck me – they weren’t cycle clips, were they? Shaun Reynolds hadn’t seen those since his granddad died. ‘Might be. Who are you?’

‘Peter Maxwell. Leighford High School.’

‘Yeah?’ It secretly unnerved Shaun Reynolds that them up at the school knew where he lived.

‘Is Michaela home?’

‘I dunno. Michaela!’ The windows rattled.

A dark haired girl whom Maxwell recognized emerged from the bowels of the hall. She looked different out of what passed for her uniform at school. Her navel dripped jewellery and she wore unseasonal boots of beige suede below yards of naked thigh. ‘Some bloke for you,’ Reynolds said and disappeared.

‘Michaela,’ Maxwell smiled at her. ‘I’m looking for Annette.’

‘I ain’t seen her.’ The girl was chasing a wedge of
chewing
gum around her mouth and, what with negotiating the tongue-stud, this was a major feat of engineering.

‘Annette’s mum seems to think otherwise.’ Maxwell stood his ground. He’d been arguing with Year Eleven girls for years.

‘Well, she’s wrong.’ Michaela stepped back to close the door, but Maxwell was faster and jammed his foot in the way.

‘I don’t think she is, Michaela,’ he said.

‘Dad!’ the girl screamed. Michaela knew Peter Maxwell. He used long words and talked loudly in corridors. She was afraid of him because he was so clearly Mad.

Reynolds was back, a copy of the
Daily Sport
in one hand, a can of Carlsberg in the other. ‘What the fuck… Is he touching you, Micky?’

‘Yeah,’ the girl blurted. ‘He was trying to grab my breasts.’

Maxwell stepped back this time, hands in the air. What? Me?

‘Is that right, mate?’ Reynolds confronted him, snarling, nose to nose with his man. ‘You trying to touch my girl?’

‘No,’ Maxwell assured him. ‘All I want is some answers.’

‘I know what you want, mate,’ Reynolds hissed, the dark hair bristling on his shoulders. ‘It’s having your bollocks cut off, one by one. How do pervs like you get a job in fucking teaching in the first place?’

‘Pervs like me?’ Maxwell was only prepared to retreat so far. Now he stood his ground, legs locked, arms by his side. In the flight or fight split-second decision scenario, men like Mad Max always chose fight.

‘Yeah. You and that Fry bloke. I read it in the local bloody paper. His wife’s bloody killed herself. Preying on young
girls. Now fuck off, off of my property, or I’m calling the police.’

‘There’s just one more thing, Mr Reynolds…’

He winced as she dabbed his nose. And she winced along with him. ‘Why don’t you keep your nose out of things, Max?’ she asked.

‘My nose,’ he mumbled. ‘That’ll be this big, throbbing thing that’s currently spreading over my face and impeding my vision, will it?’

Jacquie stood up and looked at the man she loved in her bathroom mirror. ‘You’re lucky he didn’t break your teeth. What did he use?’

‘Just his head.’ Maxwell slurred, wondering whether that particular part of Shaun Reynolds’ anatomy had been made of concrete. He was also wondering what had happened to the bit that used to separate his lips from his nostrils, in that he couldn’t see it anymore. ‘The Railway Cuttings
version
of the Glasgow Kiss, I expect sociologists call it. Still, I don’t suppose he’ll be picking his nose with his left hand for a while.’

‘Why?’ She threw the bloody cotton wool in the bin.

‘He got it caught in the door, I can’t
think
how that
happened
. Those Victorian door-frames, you know.
So
dangerous
.’

‘Great,’ she scolded. ‘He’ll probably do you for assault now. What were you thinking?’

‘I was thinking I might find Annette Choker,’ he said.

‘Come into the kitchen. I’ll get you some ice for that. We’re onto it, Max.’

‘You’ve found her, then?’ he waddled carefully across her hall and into her kitchen, his head tilted back, plugs up his nostrils.

‘Well, no, but…’

‘You know where she is?’

‘Well, not exactly…’

‘I rest my case.’

She sat him down, lovingly, on a kitchen chair before rummaging in the contents of her freezer. ‘The point I’m trying to make…’

‘…Is that Annette Choker is a police matter. Yes, I know. But, you see, when I passed a vital piece of information concerning the possible involvement of my colleague John Fry in all this, the police didn’t want to know.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jacquie said, a little surprised. ‘Who did you talk to?’ She wrapped the frozen cubes in a cloth and placed the little bundle carefully on her true love’s face.

‘Shit!’ he hissed. ‘And that’s “To whom did you talk?” by the way.’

‘Big baby!’ She knocked his hand away.

‘Woman Policeman,’ he told her. ‘Slip of a thing. Bit on edge, I thought. Using her dignity like a piles cushion. The sort of attitude that comes with being tiny, female and inadequate.’

‘That’s Alison McCormick, you uncompromising
chauvinist
bastard!’ resisting the temptation to cuff him,
lovingly
of course, around the nose. ‘Remind me again why I love you.’

‘Ha ha,’ he chuckled as best he could, ‘let me count the ways. No, I’m on a quest, light of my life.’

She looked at him, dried blood all over his shirt, dark bruises spreading under his bright eyes. A quest. Yes, that would be right. Where there were windmills and dragons, there would be Peter Maxwell, mad as a snake, pen in hand, tilting from the saddle of White Surrey for all he was
worth, pursuing whatever grail was shining in his vision. This one was a missing schoolgirl and a possible pervert. She shook her head, her eyes a little damp, her own vision a little misty.

‘Do tell,’ she said.

‘Mr Diamond, no less,’ he told her, feeling the blood trickle from his nose again. ‘My revered Headmaster. “I don’t care what it takes, Max,” he said.’ It was a
near-perfect
James Diamond, bearing in mind his obvious
indisposition
. ‘“I want you to find what our woefully inadequate police force cannot. Especially that Carpenter woman. She’s hopeless.”’

‘If you weren’t an incurable cripple already,’ she leaned over him, ‘I’d smack you with your own handbag. You’re staying here tonight.’

‘Darling, I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can,’ she insisted as only half-dressed detectives with long auburn hair can in the long watches of the night. ‘You’d never make it across town with what you’ve got.’

‘Ah, the puncture.’

‘
And
,’ she insisted again, ‘it’s the spare room for you, my lad.’

Maxwell looked even more hurt than he actually was. ‘All my wounds are before, Woman Policeman. There’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t take me roughly from behind.’

Morning had broken like the first morning by the time Peter Maxwell got up. The sun streamed in through Jacquie’s curtains onto Jacquie’s carpet and onto the note she’d left for him. She had a bitch of a day ahead of her interviewing archaeologists with Henry Hall. There was a lasagne in the fridge, wine in the rack and probably
something
black, white and celluloid on the TCM channel.
On no account
was he to go home until she got back, but it could be late.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, darling one,’ he smiled softly and pattered downstairs to mend the puncture in Surrey’s rear tyre. Norman, it seemed, hadn’t been
quite
the good egg he’d promised to be last evening and Maxwell would have words with him about that. Even though it was half-term, Maxwell’s memory was long. And Norman owed Maxwell a fiver.

The sun was still shining late that morning, as Dr Samantha Welland twirled at the end of the rope that stretched from her dislocated neck, up over the beam in her garage and to its anchorage on the far wall.